Ruth Bourne, Nazi code breaker, has died at the age of 99

Born in Salford, near Manchester, into a Jewish family, Ruth Bourne (born Ruth Henry) enlisted in 1939, at just 18 years old, in the Women’s Royal Naval Service. After training in Scotland, she was selected for a highly secret assignment and forced to sign the Official Secrets Act: from that moment she would work without possibility of career advancement and without being able to talk about her mission for decades. She was assigned to the Bletchley Park outposts in Eastcote and Stanmore, north London, staffed exclusively by female personnel. His task was to operate and control the “Turing Bomb”, an electromechanical machine capable of identifying in just a few minutes the daily keys to the Enigma encryption system used by Nazi Germany. The decoded information was then sent to military analysts and Allied leaders.

Bourne did not know the contents of the intercepted messages: “I only knew my piece of work”, he recalled several times, underlining the rigor of the imposed secrecy. Hundreds of women like her worked in continuous shifts, 24 hours a day, in an extremely precise and stressful activity. At the end of the war, by order of Winston Churchill, many of the machines were dismantled, and Ruth found herself destroying the same tools she had used for years. Only well after the conflict did the role of Bletchley Park and its operators become public knowledge.

Discharged in 1946, she married Stephen Bentall, a former RAAF airman, and had two children. In civilian life he worked as a support teacher and as a family counselor in the Jewish community. However, she remained deeply attached to Bletchley Park, where for 24 years she was a volunteer guide, showing visitors a working reconstruction of Turing’s machines.

In 2009 the British government awarded her the “We also served” commemorative badge and in 2018 she received the Legion of Honour, France’s highest military honour. In 2011 he also met Queen Elizabeth II at the inauguration of a memorial dedicated to the codebreakers. “If it hadn’t been for Bletchley Park, perhaps we would be speaking German today,” he once said. “I am proud to have been chosen. It was a privilege.”

Ruth Bourne spent her last years in High Barnet, north London. Her granddaughter Bee Bentall remembered her as “a bright, intelligent and witty woman, always happy to give her time to storytelling and teaching.” With her passing, a direct witness of one of the most decisive and secret pages in the history of the twentieth century passes away. (Of Paolo Martini)